A Nation of Gentlemen

Despite ethnic diversity, America's power elite is not multicultural.

One of the buzzwords within the academy today is "multicultural." This word means that the United States and therefore the university is the habitat of numerous distinctive cultures. Furthermore, this is to be celebrated as a good thing, laudably "diverse," a gorgeous quilt.

That the United States is multicultural is true in some ways. In the realm of power and social status, however, the United States is multi-ethnic but certainly not multicultural.

Of course there do exist pockets and enclaves of a variety of subcultures. Next door to the Long Island neighborhood where I grew up in the 1930s was a German-American beer garden, an enclosure with a high wooden fence from within which on Saturday afternoons one heard the thump of an oompah band and the sound of feet dancing to polkas. Not far away was the Shamrock Tavern, a saloon dear to local Irish-Americans. Similarly, we have had Italian, Jewish, Black, Polish, and other neighborhoods. This is part of the American scene, but it is at the bottom of the social and political pyramid.

In his fine recent book The Way of the WASP: How It Made America and How It Can Save It, Richard Brook-hiser argues that the American ethos derives from the culture of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that the essential characteristics of American culture are both admirable and necessary to the well-being of the nation. Those characteristics include self-restraint deferred gratification, a work ethic, civic-indedness, modesty, and understatedness.

Indeed the American colonists and later the founders of the American republic were for the most part literally Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with some Dutch, Germans, and Celts added. But the WASPs wrote the colonial statutes, beginning with the Mayflower Compact of 1620. The Compact established the form of representative government by consent which would be the pattern for the Colonial legislatures and the 1787 Constitution. The American political tradition, beginning in 1620, was firmly in the English Whig tradition of parliamentary supremacy that had its roots in Magna Carta. Brookhiser argues that if the United States had been founded by the French or the Spanish it would have been an entirely different polity, and not as good a one. The WASPs established our political and legal traditions. They also wrote the rules of personal conduct. Others have risen by following them.

The dominant social idea in America has been the gendeman and his female counterpart. This ideal has a fascinating history and has been much written about. Its beginnings can be traced to the English seventeenth-century conflict between royalist Cavaliers and increasingly powerful commoners, which issued in the English Civil War. Out of this conflict there emerged a third social entity, the gentleman. This was a mediating idea between the lord and the merchant. The high-strutting aristocrats, men like Lord Chesterfield and the Earl of Rochester, faced a powerful new merchant class. The powdered wigs and duelling swords, drunkenness, spitting on the floor, and the slave trade had to go as the eighteenth century established its style. The wealthy merchant class married into the aristocracy and bought country estates. In an important essay on Joseph Addison, C.S. Lewis demonstrates how Addison and Steele's Spectator essays fully codified the idea of the gentleman between 1710 and 1713, even providing him with suitable subjects for conversation. The gentleman's self-effacing manners, his politeness, his deference to women contrasted markedly with upper-class manners in France or Spain. Anew establishment of gentlemen came into being in England. It crushed the revolutionary 1780 Gordon Riots and provided the power and confidence that crushed Napoleon.

The idea of the gentleman was translated to the American colonies, becoming marginally different from the English ideal, more democratic and more relaxed. From that perspective quite possibly the most important social event in colonial history was the defeat of the French by the English and Americans in the French and Indian War. America would be culturally English. Thus the American idea of the gentleman owes little or nothing to Continental models, and even less to models from other parts of the globe. George Washington was not only the victorious general of the War of Independence but a notable American gentleman, "Gentleman George," our answer to George III.

The legacy of the gentleman continues in this country. As members of particularistic subcultures move upward on the American socio-political pyramid, they modify themselves in the direction of the WASP gentlemanly ideal. Whites, Blacks, Jews, Asians, Poles, Italians, all move in the direction of the same model. They shop at Brooks Brothers or J. Press or Saville Row. They have decent haircuts. They belong to a network of good clubs. Indeed, the function of private clubs, here as in England, is to reward the achievement of gentlem anliness. There are no dreadlocks, sombreros, or yarmulkas in the important committees and boardrooms of corporate America or in the President's Cabinet or other top government posts. Among the power brokers in America, there is no such thing as a multicultural environment.

Whatever may be their racial or religious "background" a significant term successful Americans approximate the ideal of the WASP gentleman. John F. Kennedy was a WASP and a gentleman, though a cad with women. Lee lacocca is a gentleman. So are Andrew Young and Douglas Wilder. Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, is not: he has chosen to be a "Black" figure—which means that his political aspirations will not reach much beyond Black Americans.

Multiculturalism remains an academic fantasy. Several years ago when Andrew Young visited Dartmouth, he dropped in on the Afro-American Society. He told his audience of Black students the secret of success in America: that they had to master the subjects and skills that would allow them to live in a largely white society. The Asian-American students I deal with seem to have absorbed this basic fact of American life; in individual drive and ambition the Asian- American minority is "Americanizing" as quickly as possible, even out-WASPing the WASPs.

During the 1960s a revisionist school of thought attacked the "myth" of the Melting Pot, arguing that ethnicity is unmeltable. Now these revisionists are themselves being revised. All indications are that the ethnic meltdown in America goes forward rapidly, with assimilation the order of the day, including intermarriage.

Forget about multiculturalism. It can exist only in ethnic ghettos and in the fantasy world of the elite campus. In the serious world of power and status Americans are Americans and approach an agreed-upon model, when they are serious.